Unsound Bites

OK, my daughter Naomi (born 7/12/84) was married last night -- I now have two daughters and a son invested in the bonds of matrimony -- so for today, head swimming, no big ideas, just random thoughts, unsound bites from the apple of life.

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The Federal Trade Commission fined Kellogg's for its commercial claiming Frosted Mini-Wheats had been shown to enhance the attention spans of children by 20 percent.

In fact, only half the children in the study bought attention, and only 11% gained 20%. I suppose they went from five seconds per sound bite to six.

This strikes me as excessively punitive and makes me wonder why federal regulators get distracted from weightier matters to waste time on such nonsense. You would think we employ professionals of a caliber to focus on… hey, look at that guy on the scaffolding way up there washing windows… cool…

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Speaking of serial offenders, the killer who was ticking names off Craig's List turns out to be a medical student, or so say prosecutors.

Apparently the recession is so severe, the school will no longer supply cadavers for research, leaving young pupils to fend for themselves.

On a more serious note, this should quiet suggestions that the victims shared culpability by having engaged in high-risk behavior, meeting people in an insufficiently selective setting.

No one can be faulted for accepting a date from an aspiring physician. Our prayers go out to the bereaved families.

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The surviving Somali pirate has been imported to New York City by a team of about twenty federal agents, about one for every year of his age.

There is some debate just how old he is -- notwithstanding our vigesimal vigilance -- with a woman claiming to be his mother claiming he is sixteen. Then again maybe she figures we'll give him citizenship in order to try him, after which she will be given a compassionate visa to hold his hand on Visiting Day.

Add up the salaries of the people policing, transporting, incarcerating and prosecuting him, plus incidental expenses, and the final bill will be two or three times the ransom we saved. Still, we prefer to spend the money here to… ahem, stimulate the economy.

(This is from the can't-resist-sharing department. My brother, Israel Homnick of Indianapolis, was driving down the highway behind a dump truck with a load of construction debris. Pebbles were falling onto the highway as the driver sped over bumps on the road. My brother turned to his wife in the passenger seat and said: "Now that man needs tarp money.")

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One outstanding quality Obama has over Bush is the ability to sound like he knows whereof he speaks. This has a wonderfully reassuring effect in the heartland.

For example, we need no longer fear the impending implosion of the Pakistani government, which would leave their nuclear weapons stockpile exposed to depredation by deleterious elements… because we now have a leader who knows to pronounce it Pock-ee-stonn in place of Pack-is-tan.

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The Associated Press, in a serious analysis, opined that Kim Jong Il of North Korea has crafted his foreign policy under the influence of the 1959 movie The Mouse That Roared (based on he delightful novel by Leonard Wibberley), starring Peter Sellers in multiple roles.

This should provide our diplomatic corps with an easy solution to an otherwise tangled web. They should present Il with a copy of It's A Wonderful Life; that is sure to give him proper perspective on what really matters in our all-too-brief sojourn on this planet.

Then again, we may not want to get him too excited about the virtues of the nuclear family.

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This article represents my affirmative action for people with abbreviated attention spans.

Now if they want to read some of our other writers, they had better load up on those Frosted Mini-Wheats.

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